Israeli troops tighten grip on Palestinians

The Israeli army tightened its grip on the Palestinian city of Ramallah today, killing at least five Palestinians as its biggest offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 35 years stormed on.

At least 41 people on both sides were killed on Tuesday, another day of death in double digits ahead of the expected arrival on Thursday of U.S. Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni on a truce mission.

"Zinni will not succeed if we do not help him," Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the government's leading dove, said on Channel Two television in implicit criticism of the two-week-old West Bank and Gaza campaign, now involving 20,000 troops.

Some 150 armoured vehicles, including tanks, thrust into Ramallah and nearby refugee camps on Tuesday, tearing up roads and crushing cars in the main Palestinian commercial and political hub in the West Bank, witnesses said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his harshest criticism of Israel, urged it to stop "the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians".

The invasion force stayed out of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the city, and Israel's army chief, Lieutenant-General Shaul Mofaz, reiterated in comments to reporters that Israel had no plans to topple or harm him.

Gunmen fired at troops searching house to house in Ramallah, a city of more than 200,000, for weapons and militants.

Hours after tanks occupied Ramallah, trapping Arafat in his office, two gunmen disguised as Israeli soldiers killed six Israelis near the Lebanese border before troops shot them dead.

The attack raised fears in Israel of a second, northern, front, along with the 17-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Major-General Gaby Ashkenazy, chief of Israel's northern command, said in an evening briefing it was unclear whether the gunmen had come from Lebanon or from Palestinian-ruled areas.

The surging violence threatened to derail Zinni's third Middle East mission before its start. It was also increasingly overshadowing a Middle East tour by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney aimed at exploring a consensus against Iraq. Cheney was due in Egypt on Wednesday after visiting Jordan on Tuesday.

Nine Palestinians were killed in other violence in Gaza and an Israeli was shot dead in a West Bank ambush.

At least 1,061 Palestinians and 340 Israelis have been killed since the uprising began.

Colonel Gad Hirsch, head of Israeli military operations in the West Bank, said soldiers had captured dozens of "hardcore" militants, confiscated weapons and located bomb-making factories in sweeps of refugee camps in recent days.

Some detainees were forced to stand blindfolded with their hands tied and stripped to their waists, witnesses said.

In an incident that embarrassed a state founded after the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews, Israeli soldiers marked identification numbers on the arms of Palestinians arrested in a sweep earlier this week.

Arafat, drawing a comparison with numbers tattooed on the arms of Jews in German concentration camps during World War Two, told Abu Dhabi television on Monday that the Israeli army's conduct during the sweeps amounted to "new Nazi racism".

Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said in a statement that he took a grave view of the practice and "instructed all security authorities to stop it immediately".